You Had to Be There Documentary: How Godspell Shaped Modern Comedy

In 1972, a cast of unknown Toronto twenty-somethings came together for Godspell. They would go on to change the landscape of modern comedy.

Every few years, someone points out that a lot of American comedy traces back to a handful of Canadians in the early 1970s.

The first trailer for You Had to Be There is out. This documentary connects one regional stage musical to SCTV, Saturday Night Live, and a surprising number of other projects.

That Cast!

In 1972, producer Ed Mirvish brought Godspell to Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre. Instead of importing a touring cast, he ran an open call for local talent. The plan was a six-week engagement. It ended up running fourteen months and 488 performances before finally closing in August 1973.

The cast that resulted from that open call included: Martin Short (Only Murders in the Building), Eugene Levy (Schitt’s Creek), Gilda Radner (Saturday Night Live), Andrea Martin (The Guilded Age), Dave Thomas (Arrested Development), Jayne Eastwood (My Big Fat Greek Wedding), and Victor Garber (Alias), with Paul Shaffer as musical director. None of them were famous yet. All of them would be.

The documentary tracking all this has a title almost as long as the cast list: You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (in a Canadian Kind of Way). Nick Davis directs and co-wrote it with Jane Mendelsohn, and Judd Apatow, who has quietly built a whole side career producing comedy documentaries (Mel Brooks, Garry Shandling, George Carlin), is on board as executive producer.

It premiered at TIFF in September 2025 and took second runner-up for the festival’s People’s Choice Documentary award. It also currently sits at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes based on the festival reviews. Greenwich Entertainment picked it up for a wide release this fall.

A Hairy Decision

Short and Levy were college friends who took the Godspell gig as their first professional job. Radner, Martin, and Thomas went on to build SCTV together. Shaffer, also on his first job in the business, eventually landed behind a piano on late-night television for a few decades. Garber played Jesus and was the only cast member invited to reprise the role in the 1973 film version.

Which meant somebody had to take over as Jesus on the Toronto stage once Garber left for the movie. That somebody was Levy, who inherited both the role and the show’s one small design problem: the character spends the musical shirtless. Producers reportedly asked Levy to wax his chest for the part. He said no. They put him in a tank top instead, apparently out of concern for how the front rows would handle the sight of him unwaxed.

Apatow has framed the pipeline pretty simply: this one show fed Second City Toronto, then SCTV, then Saturday Night Live, and from there a genuinely absurd list of downstream credits, from Splash to The Three Amigos to Schitt’s Creek and Only Murders in the Building.

The Doc

Unfortunately, no footage of the original production survives. So, Davis uses animated sequences cut against new interviews with the surviving cast: Levy, Short, Martin, Garber, Shaffer, Thomas, Eastwood, and cast members Valda Aviks, Avril Chown, Don Scardino, and Rudy Webb. Composer Stephen Schwartz (Wicked) shows up too, alongside fans like Mike Myers (Shrek), Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton), Janeane Garofalo (Wet Hot American Summer), Heidi Gardner (Shrinking), Gary Gulman (Life & Beth), and James Austin Johnson (SNL). Gilda Radner and John Candy, both now gone, appear in archival footage. Candy was never in the cast, which bothered him enough that there’s footage of him grumbling about being left out.

Watch the trailer below:

You Had to Be There opens nationwide on September 25, 2026, from Greenwich Entertainment.